Ask Americans to name a famous Asian American, and a large share of them cannot do it. In The Asian American Foundation's 2025 STAATUS Index, 42 percent of Americans could not name a single famous Asian American, and the most common answer among those who tried was Jackie Chan, who is not American. A GBH report this month cited a related finding from the same research: 37 percent of Americans said they could not think of even one film with an Asian American character. Those numbers are a useful reality check at a moment when Asian American representation on screen feels, from the inside, like it has never been stronger.

What the STAATUS Index found

The Asian American Foundation surveyed 4,909 U.S. adults ages 16 and older between January 22 and February 25, 2025, and released the results in May. Beyond the name recognition gap, the findings were sobering. Forty percent of Americans said Asian Americans are more loyal to their countries of origin than to the United States, a figure TAAF said had doubled since 2021. More than a quarter viewed Chinese Americans as a national security threat.

There was some good news. Nearly 80 percent of Americans supported initiatives to uplift Asian American communities, and 48 percent said Asian Americans are treated fairly, a five-year high.

The media findings were especially revealing. Among respondents ages 16 to 24, 43 percent said they learn about Asians through anime and 42 percent through Korean dramas. In other words, a large share of young Americans form their picture of Asian people from media made in Asia, not from Asian American stories.

Why the gap exists

The last few years produced real milestones, from Oscar winners to hit series. But visibility inside a community is not the same as visibility across the country. A show that feels like a cultural event on Asian American social media may never reach most viewers' feeds. Streaming has fragmented audiences so thoroughly that even a successful series can be invisible to millions of people.

There is also the problem of who gets cast where. In a GBH conversation this month, Jenny Korn of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and Wellesley College professor Elena Creef discussed whether Asian representation is moving beyond supporting roles. The question matters because supporting roles rarely create household names. Audiences remember leads.

The anime and K-drama effect

The popularity of anime and Korean dramas is a genuine cultural shift, and it has made Asian aesthetics and stories mainstream in a way that would have been hard to imagine 20 years ago. But it can also blur an important line. Loving K-dramas does not mean knowing anything about Korean Americans in Los Angeles. Watching anime does not mean understanding Japanese American history.

That blur feeds the perpetual foreigner stereotype the loyalty numbers reflect. If most of what someone knows about Asian people comes from content produced abroad, it becomes easier to see Asian Americans as from somewhere else rather than as neighbors.

What would change the numbers

Representation that builds recognition tends to share a few features: Asian American leads rather than ensembles where they are one of many, stories set in recognizably American places, and projects with enough marketing behind them to reach audiences beyond the community. It also takes time. Household names are built over years and multiple projects, not a single breakout.

Fair judgment matters too. As we wrote about Netflix's Dang!, the instinct to judge Asian American projects before they are released can cost them the chance to find an audience at all.

What audiences can do

The simplest lever is attention. Watch Asian American projects in their opening weekend or first week on streaming, when platforms decide what to promote. Recommend them outside your own circles. Support Asian American film festivals and the independent filmmakers who often become the next decade's showrunners.

The STAATUS numbers are a reminder that representation is not finished when a project gets made. It is finished when the rest of the country can name the people in it.